Assignment

Book cover design for "Capitalism in the Web of Life: Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital" by Jason W. Moore.

Summary of the book:Finance. Climate. Food. Work. How are the crises of the twenty-first century connected? In Capitalism in the Web of Life, Jason W. Moore argues that the sources of today’s global turbulence have a common cause: capitalism as a way of organizing nature, including human nature. Drawing on environmentalist, feminist, and Marxist thought, Moore offers a groundbreaking new synthesis: capitalism as a “world-ecology” of wealth, power, and nature. Capitalism’s greatest strength—and the source of its problems—is its capacity to create Cheap Natures: labor, food, energy, and raw materials. That capacity is now in question. Rethinking capitalism through the pulsing and renewing dialectic of humanity-in-nature, Moore takes readers on a journey from the rise of capitalism to the modern mosaic of crisis. Capitalism in the Web of Life shows how the critique of capitalism-in-nature—rather than capitalism and nature—is key to understanding our predicament, and to pursuing the politics of liberation in the century ahead.

Approach

This piece is inspired by the concept of accumulation in the subtitle (Ecology and the Accumulation of Capital). We used a material that would let us play with lots of tiny things coming together – minuscule glass beads – to create a visual metaphor for both capital and the ecosystem. The image was made by building a physical setup involving swarms of these glass beads and printed typography, which we photographed. In the final cover, a photograph of thousands of small dots or bubbles accumulating around typography is an abstract metaphor for capitalism, nature, and the human population.